The sales pitch for Gateway Island is that it's the ultimate gateway game because for those coming new to modern board games it offers an introduction to the whole raft of different mechanics. You couldn't credibly attempt that with a single accessible game but Gateway Island is in fact a compendium of 21 different minigames. For each of these games, Matteo Boca and P S Martensen's Gateway Island gives a clear, exemplified rules explanation. It sets out the mechanics used and, very commendably, it suggests other board games the players will probably enjoy if they liked that particular gateway game. And the various recommended games range over a very wide array of publishers (only a couple are other titles from publishers Van Ryder and PostScriptum).
For many folk presented with a new board game, it's the prospect of learning new rules that's the biggest barrier to entry. It's why so many fall back on the flawed familiar, breaking out a tired old copy of Monopoly rather than trying something new. The bad news in Gateway Island is that providing clear and exemplified rules for >20 different games means you end up with a rulebook that's >70 pages long! Of course, the rules for each game mostly take just 2 or 3 pages but the thick rules book may already be enough to have scared off many newbies. There is help at hand tho' because there's a QR code for each game that takes you to the Van Ryder website where the intention is to provide a 'how to play' video for each game. At the time of writing, however, that's still work in progress: when we sampled the QR codes they took us to the Van Ryder website rather than directly to the rules for the game in which we were interested.
Less daunting than the rulebook, Gateway Island comes with a 'Supplement': an eight-page booklet that offers a brief definition of the various game mechanics and a glossary of the terms you might typically hear bandied about by experienced gamers. Armed with this, those coming new to the table will be able to decode some of the jargon that gamers slip into. Not everyone knows what a 'meeple' is, tho' we doubt many need to be supplied with an explanation of 'cardboard tokens'.
The Gateway Island box comes with a large set of double-sided boards, attractively illustrated by Sara Gioria and numbered so you can pull out the boards needed for specific games. The box lid has a scoring track printed on the inside, and there's a bag of additional components - a six-sided die, wooden cubes and discs - for use in various of the games.
Gateway Island ranks each of its 21 mini games by complexity and player count. This is especially useful, with the back cover of the rule book incorporating these lists along with an index of all the different game mechanics so you can use this to choose the game you are going to play. The only additional element that might be helpful here is playing time, but then none of the games in Gateway Island is so long that it's likely to overstay its welcome: the majority of the games in the box run to around 20-30 minutes.
Remember, the aim of each of the Gateway Island games is to introduce a board game mechanic to players coming new to it. If you're an experienced board gamer you're probably not going to turn to Gateway Island as your gamers' night game but for most of us it will be a useful addition to our collection as a way of easing family and friends into board game mechanics that go beyond the familiar roll & move. Just don't frighten them off with sight of that hefty 72-page rulebook!
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
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